Sunday

Jul 29, 2018 at 3:30 AM

SALEM - Over four decades, Sally Mann has created striking photographs that evoke stories about the secret lives of children, haunted memories buried in the soil and the scars that separate and bind the races across the South.

In the first international traveling exhibit of her work, Mann reveals the breadth and depth of her themes and technical expertise in a magisterial show at the Peabody Essex Museum that places her among the foremost American photographers of recent times.

Jointly organized by the PEM and National Gallery of Art in Washington, “Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings” features 115 photographs – many which have never been displayed or published before – in the region’s most personal and powerful current exhibit.

“As an artist, Sally Mann is grappling with the most profound American experiences,” said Sarah Kennel, PEM curator of photography. “A lot of artists don’t take on these themes. Mann’s ambition and willingness to take risks and ask us to think about history are embedded in these photos.”

Working with organizers at both museums, Mann has forged an especially ambitious exhibit that presents new photographs that explore complex themes about the artist and her native South, including family bonds, the power of memory, the pull and push of place and race and the ravages of mortality.

“Mann’s ambition and timeliness are evident in the themes and subjects she probes in her art,” said Kennel.

She said the exhibit has been designed to help viewers see how Mann’s photos as “deliberate artistic constructions” that tell stories that provoke feelings and emotions.

The exhibit is organized – chronologically and thematically – into five sections that each occupy one or more galleries: "Family"; "The Land"; "Last Measure"; "Abide with Me"; and "What Remains".

Visitors will see a progression of compelling, mostly black-and-white photos of everyday scenes (often staged) that, through Mann’s craft, evoke an aura of interred meaning that hits viewers with a visual and then emotional one-two punch.

She creates gorgeous images that express narratives, like William Faulkner’s textured novels, about a misunderstood region that confounds its inhabitants and outsiders in contrasting ways.

The show’s opening section, “Family,” features expressive photos from the 1980s of Mann’s son and two daughters taken around their remote cabin not far from Lexington, Virginia, where the children enact composed scenes of innocence and playacting with an undercurrent of vulnerability and danger.

Always a technical innovator, Mann used a large-format 8-by-10 inch view camera to compose atmospheric black-and-white and color images of her semi-clothed and sometimes naked children that present childhood as a rural Eden offering both angelic innocence and serpents nesting in the shadows.

Mann’s revelatory photos of shadowy woods and misty rivers, dismal swamps and ruined estates in the second section, “The Land,” seem to reflect a quotation by historian and former Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, featured as wall text: “The Earth Remembers.”

Using antique lenses, high-contrast Ortho film and the 19th century collodion wet plate process, she has achieved her goal of capturing “the radical light of the American South” in photos that can justly said to evoke a landscape and region haunted by memories of racism, war and violence.

Taking its title from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the third section, “Last Measure,” employed and heightened some technical approaches from the prior section to depict once bloody battlefields like Cold Harbor and Antietam in consciously scarred photos that speak to enduring memories of suffering and loss.

In perhaps the exhibit’s most ambitious - and daring - fourth section, “Abide with Me,” Mann examines the South’s tormented legacy of race through moodily expressive images of swamplands and riverways where escaped slaves once sought refuge and the simple white frame churches where African-Americans worshiped.

Taken in the early 2000s, the photos in this section include allusive images of black men that seem to suggest Mann’s efforts to transcend the social barriers that separate them.

Some of the exhibit’s most poignant images feature Virginia Carter, the African-American woman who served as Mann’s primary caregiver during her childhood.

Among the show’s most powerful, these large atmospheric photos, made using collodion-process negatives, convey the breadth of divisions still separating the races and Mann’s artistic efforts to bridge them.

Coming full circle, the exhibit ends where it began with Mann’s family in the final poignant section, “What Remains.”

Now grown, her children gaze like apparitions through gauze in portraits far removed from their youthful exuberance. Mann’s son, Emmett who struggled with schizophrenia and committed suicide in 2016, seems to stare as if from behind a death mask.

Several of the show’s most gripping images chronicle with stark honesty the physical ravages of muscular dystrophy endured by Mann’s husband, Larry, a lawyer and blacksmith.

This absolute must-see exhibit’s final photo, of Larry Mann, titled “The Turn,” shows him setting out across misty fields heading toward distant woods in a sublime image seemingly clouded by history and memories.

Located in Salem with its own haunted memories, the Peabody Essex has brought Mann’s gorgeous, grief-stricken history of the South to New England.

Only by confronting ghosts can they be exorcised.

“Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings”

WHEN: Through Sept. 23

WHERE: Peabody Essex Museum, 161 Essex St., East India Square, Salem

ADMISSION: Adults, $20; Seniors, $18; Students, $12. There is an additional $6 fee for the Yin Yu Tang house